


Coming home to lose

by piggy09



Series: Obscure Word Fics [2]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, I am hand-waving the "when where how" of this sue me, No Helena food does not equal friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-26
Updated: 2014-01-26
Packaged: 2018-01-10 01:58:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1153414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Someone has been leaving food on Rachel Duncan's desk. She is going to get to the bottom of this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coming home to lose

**Author's Note:**

> From a prompt on Tumblr:  
> "Helena & Rachel | Ultracrepidarian: of one who speaks or offers opinions on matters beyond their knowledge."
> 
> This was ridiculously fun to write.

The first day Rachel finds a pile of sugar packets on her desk, she’s not really sure what to think. No one really comes _in_ to Rachel’s office, with its empty glass walls and dizzying views of the city. It reeks of hollowness, and so she sits alone in it and fills the space with the empty clacking of keys. People normally know better.

She looks at the sugar packets for a moment or two, and then sweeps them into the garbage. Most likely a prank.

The second time there’s a smashed piece of bread with a bite taken out of it. She uses an old contract to pick it up and throw it away, following its sisters. She considers, briefly, making someone stand outside the door. Then she dismisses that as ridiculous, and gets back to work. Still: she is unsettled.

When she walks in and sees the carcass of a roast chicken on her desk, oozing grease all over some _very important paperwork_ , she snaps.

…If your definition of “snapping” is taking several deep breaths in through your nose and out through your mouth and throwing away the chicken.

She stays _late_ , idly watching the lights in the city below flicker on and off as she keeps herself busy. There’s always something to do, after all. Always something to fill time while you wait to confront whoever _ruined_ this week’s work.

That’s what she’s thinking as she hears footsteps padding up to her door. Rachel looks up and sharpens her gaze to glass and steel, waiting to tell off some junior scientist looking for a prank—

And meets her own eyes, startled and wide, surrounded by a frizzy halo of blonde hair.

The other woman is carrying, inexplicably, an entire birthday cake.

The two of them blink at each other, and Rachel rattles through all the names she knows in her mind, matching them to faces. The realization slowly settles in her stomach that she _does not know_ this version of herself. This should be completely impossible.

While she has been thinking this, the woman at the door has been licking frosting off her finger. Her tongue is pink, like a cat’s.

“I can explain,” she says, not looking very concerned. She has an accent, Eastern European, that twists the words into _I ken explen_. Rachel thinks back to Aldous’ excitement, his voice rising to new heights on the phone, and thinks, suddenly, _Helena_.

“Explain, then,” she says coolly. You can’t give anyone the upper hand.

“Mm,” hums her double around a fingerful of frosting. She slouches further into the room and slumps onto the chair across from Rachel. The two of them are even more of a contrast than her and Sarah, somehow.

The woman who may or may not be Helena looks around the room, eyes wide. Rachel thinks she’s forgotten what she was saying entirely when she speaks, words falling with a sudden sharpness from her mouth like dropping an armful of books.

“Sarah said that you were sad,” she says, licking her lips. The word _Sarah_ is audibly caressed by her lips as she releases it. “I was sad once. Then Sarah gave me food because she loved me and I was not sad.”

She nods, once, and looks at the cake as if deciding whether or not to eat the whole thing. _Happy birthday, Graeme!_ the top proclaims. Rachel doesn’t know anyone named Graeme and she doubts Helena does.

Rachel decides to ignore Helena’s _2+2=sugar packets_ logic and jump directly to what she finds most relevant. “Sarah said that I was sad,” she says slowly, disbelief dripping from her lips.

Helena has scooped up a handful of cake and now she pauses, with her hand oozing frosting and her mouth open to receive the delivery. “Nooooo,” she says slowly. “She said—”

She stuffs the entire handful of cake in her mouth, unhinging her jaw like a snake, and swallows it rapidly. Then, in an admirable attempt at Sarah’s accent, she says, “I can’t believe that bloody Rachel bitch. I’m gonna shoot her in the leg, I swear. Who the hell does she think she is?!”

Helena looks at Rachel and attempts to beam. The smile dies on its way to the corners of her mouth.

Rachel stands up and walks slowly over to the window. The city looks exactly the same. She has not been transported to some strange parallel dimension. Right.

“I’m afraid that isn’t enough evidence to justify leaving food on my desk,” she tells her reflection in the glass.

Helena says something that sounds a lot like “mmrf,” before swallowing. “Sarah called me a bitch, too,” she says, carefully pronouncing the word _bitch_ like she is handling something fragile and precious. “Then she stabbed me in the side.”

She pauses.

“It hurt a lot,” she says sulkily. “But then we were friends. And now our connection is so strong that we are never truly apart.”

Rachel can see that, to Helena’s mind, this is conclusive evidence as to the merits of stealing other people’s birthday cakes. She allows her eyes to flutter closed for a brief moment before swiveling and returning to her desk.

“Helena,” she says carefully, and knows she’s hit jackpot when her double widens her eyes. “I’m afraid we can’t be friends.”

A dark cloud passes over Helena’s face. “You are sad,” she says dangerously. Her fingers squelch as she digs them into the cake.

“I am not,” Rachel replies, her voice threaded with steel. “Even if I was, it is _not_ your place to bring me food. Do we understand each other?”

Helena’s fingers twitch in the trampled mess of the cake, as if she’s aching to reach for Rachel’s throat. (This seems counterintuitive, to Rachel, but there’s no accounting for upbringing.)

“If you are sad and Sarah is sad—” she begins, her voice low and flat and deadly, but Rachel is having none of it.

“ _Do we understand each other_ ,” she hisses, her hands _not_ shaking, and she’s counting on the Proletheans being as horrible as they have always been described, but she can’t quite feel bad about it when Helena flinches as if she’s been struck by a fist.

“Yes,” she says softly. “I apologize.” Her eyes are wide and she looks so, so afraid.

“Good,” Rachel says, all business. “If you leave now I will not use you to find Sarah and the others. I can offer that, for your troubles.”

Helena’s eyes somehow widen more – she hadn’t thought of that, evidently – but she stands up and moves towards the door, cake and all.

Partway out of the room, she turns and looks at Rachel. A smile twitches at the corner of her mouth, but she says nothing. Then she is gone.

Rachel lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding and prepares to leave herself. She tells herself the mess is over, and no one has to know that the “white whale” was here. Rachel can plead plausible deniability. Or something.

When she comes in the next day and sees a cake on her desk, _I’m Sorry_ written in sloppy icing, she pauses before throwing it out and thinks of cats and dead things, and loyalties, and the looming threat of Sarah on the horizon, and that twitching smile at the corner of Helena’s mouth. Then she sighs, and cuts herself a slice.

The cake is absolutely _terrible_.

She eats the whole thing.  

**Author's Note:**

> "Halfway starts with happiness for me  
> Halfway house, lost kitten in the street  
> Hit me where it hurts, I'm coming home to lose  
> Kitten on the catwalk, high-heeled shoes"  
> \--"Lost Kitten," Metric
> 
> Song chosen because the idea of Helena leaving dead things on people's doorsteps like a cat was too beautiful to ignore.


End file.
